The inspiration to write this article was our interview with
Mike van Rossum, a blockchain developer and the creator of Gekko, an open-source Bitcoin
cryptocurrency trading bot.

If we try to predict the nearest future of finances, we shouldn’t throw
away the probability of its complete change and difference from modern
state of things. The change is happening now. It’s enough to simply
retrospect the trading branch. With the rise of the age of digitalism,
every part of buy-and-sell process is shapeshifting with the incredible
speed. There are its benefits but also there are the drawbacks. Now, apart
from fiat money, we also have virtual assets, cryptocurrencies. They’re
rapidly becoming the inalienable part of our financial side of life.

To stay competition-capable you have to constantly review and enrich the
product’s functionality. One of such ways to innovate the mobile
marketplace app is to provide the opportunity to pay with cryptocurrency.
Here, we’re going to consider its benefits, drawbacks and how to accept
Bitcoin payments.

Reasons to implement coin payment system for marketplace platform
development

Let us first state the reasons by means of cryptocurrency numbers and statistics.
Let’s consider 3 major segments in this field: number of digital wallets,
exchanges and payments made with cryptocurrencies.

In 2016, the share of consumers who decided to pay with cryptocurrencies on
the daily basis in Eastern Europe was 11%.

Another, statistic is taken from Blockchain.info, one of the most popular
digital wallets out here. It counts nearly 100+ m of transactions.

Nearly 37% of 51 exchanges based in 27 countries polled are European-based.

As of 2017:

52% of payment companies-respondents provided merchant services.

19% of payment organizations provided B2B cryptocurrency payments.

The land of opportunities

As the research states, exchanges organizations hire the largest number of
employees in comparison with other cryptocurrency sectors.

The average business (B2B) payment has a transaction size of $1,878,
whereas P2P transfers ($351) have higher average transaction sizes than
consumer (C2B) payments ($210).

Accept cryptocurrency payments and gain the following benefits

Providing your B2B or B2C marketplace users with the space to pay with cryptocurrency and national
currency can result in the double profit: your customer and you can reach
better outcome:

New audience means new opportunities
By implementing bitcoin and altcoins payment integration, you can
draw new segment of target audience to your marketplace business.
Following this, you can gain a win-win strategy approach - provide
an opportunity for your customers to pay with digital money which
is safe and fast, and gain revenue.

High speed of transactions/payments
No dependence on the 3rd party services
This results in lower transactions fees and instant assets
receiving, since you perform a peer-to-peer transaction.

Chances to do more integrations and get more recognized
The tech world is heavily influenced by trends. Getting recognized
is just a matter of how fast a product will catch a certain trendy
hype and implement it. The same is with blockchain. Everything new
is the road to changes, which can be sometimes painful but at the
end it might open up the new profitable ways to engage your
marketplace platform in.

Strong safety measures thanks to Blockchain technology
Using cryptography method hashing, it’s almost impossible to hack
the data contained in the transactions and payments operations.
Further in the article we describe the matter of blockchain system
security.

Contribution to the establishment of new business economy model
You can start pioneering in the the new marketplace business
economy model which depends less on the 3rd-party services and is
open-source, more secure (yes, these 2 words are paired together)
and open to the new opportunities.

Security

The blockchain technology has proved itself by creating the atmosphere of
more secured transactions operations by means of cryptography, hashing and
timestamping. The technology is decentralized, based on peer-to-peer
network and heavily depends on ‘blocks’. The recorded transactions data
can’t be modified without the alteration of other ‘blocks’ which
participated in the transaction operation.

According to Mike van Rossum, in the nearest future, we might use
blockchain-based secured technologies for finance, healthcare and
governmental organization (voting, financial aid).

The most widespread security option among the cryptocurrency-related
organizations is two-factor authentication (2FA). It’s offered to customers
by the majority of exchanges and is required for employees for most
operations.

As it comes out from the whole bundle of stats provided, we live in the
era, if roughly, of two types of assets: national currencies and
cryptocurrencies. To enhance the product’s financial climate, we have to
find the ways to get the most of both categories.

The danger zone

As Mike van Rossum stated, there’s a possibility of the ‘bubble’ effect,
just like dotcom hysteria
at the beginning of 2000-s. People tend to overthink (overdream)
expectations, and some of them, if not most of them, may not be brought to
life at all.

After we’ve Googled for ‘dotcom bubble’:

Just for you to understand. Are people already starting to suspect
something? Hmm ?

Another danger to be conscious of is the cryptocurrency volatility. At the
beginning of December 2017, Steam decided
to stop accept bitcoin payments , because of its instability which causes high fees and unpredictable
losses.

How to accept cryptocurrency/Bitcoin payments?

Let’s get directly to how you can introduce the coin payment system for your business. Most of the cryptocurrency payment gateway services offer API
integration. The list of several services which allow you to do this: